How Messaging Apps Are Disrupting The Mobile Ecosystem

BII
Depending on whom you ask, messaging is either the most important mobile phone feature or the second-most — after regular-old phone calls. Messaging, led by SMS texts, has grown to become a huge global industry and a revenue windfall for the world's mobile carriers: $140 billion annually over the next three years.

However, a new batch of companies are providing over-the-top (OTT) messaging services — services that send instant messages over the Internet and don't depend on wireless cell networks.

The OTT services are already causing big changes in the mobile industry. From Facebook's Messenger service to Santa Clara, Calif.-based startup WhatsApp — which boasts 200 million monthly active users, more than than Twitter, and Korea's LINE, these players are some of the biggest crowd-draws in mobile. It's not just carriers that are threatened, but legacy social media too.

In a new report from BI Intelligence, we profile some of the most important OTT players in mobile messaging, and detail the monetization opportunity for OTT messaging. We also identify what competitors must do — and some have already started doing — to guard against the OTT threat.